Theobald Boehm

Theobald Böhm (or Boehm) (9 April 1794 – 25 November 1881) was a German inventor and musician, who greatly improved the modern Western concert flute and Clarinet and its fingering system (now known as the “Boehm system”). He was a Bavarian court musician, a virtuoso flautist and a renowned composer. The fingering system he devised has also been adapted to other instruments, such as the oboe and the clarinet. Life and works Born in Munich, in the Electorate of Bavaria, to the goldsmith Carl Friedrich Böhm and his wife Anna Franziska (née Sulzbacher), the daughter of a court haberdasher, Böhm learned his father’s trade of goldsmithing in his childhood. This skill enabled him to make his own flute. He became proficient enough to play in an orchestra at the age of seventeen, and at twenty-one was appointed first flautist in the Royal Bavarian Orchestra. In 1871 Boehm published Die Flöte und das Flötenspiel (“The Flute and Flute-Playing”), a treatise on the acoustical, technical and artistic characteristics of the Boehm system flute. Boehm’s experience as a goldsmith was a key factor in his ability to redesign the flute. For example, in The Flute and Flute-Playing he recounts having mad